The setup was simple and insane. He’d rigged a heavy-duty pitching machine normally used for baseballs, but he’d modified the feeder to hold taped-up hockey pucks. He was standing twenty feet away, wearing nothing but a vintage Bruins jersey, cargo shorts, and a pair of plastic safety goggles he’d found in his dad's garage.
The screen cut to black. Within an hour of the upload, the video had a hundred thousand hits. Aiden was a star, at least until the bruises healed and he had to find something even more painful to do for the next one. ItsGonnaHurt.com - Aiden From Boston.mp4
Aiden didn't scream. He just dropped. The camera kept rolling for three minutes—the silence of the basement only broken by the mechanical whir of the empty pitching machine. Just as the video was about to time out, Aiden’s hand appeared at the bottom of the frame, reaching for the tripod. The setup was simple and insane
The basement air in South Boston smelled like old copper and damp concrete, but to Aiden, it smelled like an opportunity. He adjusted the ring light—a cheap thing that flickered if he breathed too hard—and checked the frame on his DSLR. The screen cut to black
The final puck was the "money shot." In the video file that would eventually be titled Aiden From Boston.mp4 , this is the part where the comments always exploded. The machine misfired slightly, the puck rising higher than the others. It clipped the bottom of Aiden’s jaw and slammed into his collarbone. The sound was like a dry branch snapping.
"Alright, we’re live," he muttered, though the video wasn’t a stream. It was a recording destined for a URL that was already becoming a legend in the darker corners of the internet: ItsGonnaHurt.com .